Deep freeze seed bank initiated

Construction of a ‘doomsday’ seed bank started on 19 June, near the
town of Longyearbyen, on the remote island of Spitsbergen, only 1,120 km from the
North Pole. The prime ministers of five Nordic countries gathered for the
occasion.1

The seed vault, to be underground in the side of a rocky mountain, will be built
to withstand all conceivable disasters, even an atom bomb. It has been designed
to back up existing seed collections around the world, some of which are vulnerable,
and will contain up to 3 million seeds.

The ground remains frozen all the time in this part of the world, meaning that even
if the refrigeration designed to keep the seeds at deep-freeze temperature of below
-18°C fails, it will take up to months for the temperature to rise to that of
the surrounding sandstone (about -4°C). A combination of low temperature and
storage in aluminium foil to keep out moisture will ensure that the seeds remain
viable for up to thousands of years—so claims the report in Nature.2

However, this is wishful thinking—there is no way known to store seeds of
most plants so as to maintain their viability for thousands of years. Experts
at the Federal ex situ Genebank in Germany made this point in correspondence
to Nature:

‘ … the vast majority of plant seeds cannot be stored for more than
40 years without losing germination vigour, however low the temperature and however
thick the concrete walls of the vault.’3

The government of Norway is funding the construction of the facility and a trust
has been formed to pay for the yearly maintenance. No permanent staff will
man the facility.

Why preserve seeds?

Why the need for such a repository of the seeds? As Norwegian Prime Minister
Jens Stoltenberg said, ‘It will contribute to ensuring our food security’.1
A spokesman for the Global Diversity Trust, the Rome-based charity that has helped
organize the bank, called the genetic diversity in the seed collections ‘the
most valuable natural resource in the world’.1

… the most valuable natural resource in the world.

As farmers adopted varieties bred by plant breeders, they abandoned the old traditional
varieties and many of these are now only preserved in the seed banks. Those
abandoned varieties have genes in them that are missing from the modern highly selected
varieties often grown in huge areas (monoculture)—as we have pointed out,
selection causes loss
of genetic information. For example, if you select wheat for short stems,
then you are eliminating genes that result in long stems (wild wheat will have genes
for both, resulting in a mixture of plants of variable height, which does not make
such plants suitable for mechanical harvesting).

Everyone agrees that loss of genetic diversity is a bad thing because it is the
source of possibly important future genetic information for the breeding of plants—such
as breeding for disease resistance, or nutritional characteristics that are not
currently appreciated. An example of the latter is the glycemic index (GI)
of a cereal product, which indicates how quickly the starch in a food is converted
into blood sugar (glucose). GI has only recently been recognized as important
in human nutrition. Jasmine rice, which is very popular with Chinese food,
has an extremely high GI, which is not good for the health of sedentary people.
Some traditional varieties grown in Bangladesh have very low GI, which is much better.
If the low GI varieties had been lost, it might not have been possible to breed
new varieties with low GI. Seed banks ensure that such genetic information
is preserved. For more on the need for preserving seeds, see
‘What! … no potatoes?’

If all the genetic information in plants arose by accidental changes (mutations)
over billions of years, without any intelligent input—the usual evolutionary
dogma—then surely intelligent scientists, with all their accumulated knowledge,
can create a few genes here and there? Well, no, in spite of the phenomenal
advance of scientific knowledge, it is beyond the ability of scientists to invent
new functional genes just yet—to confer disease resistance, for example.
And yet many of those same scientists accept the evolutionary dogma that all
the information, all the genes, effectively made themselves without any
intelligent input from anyone. It is not terribly
logical.

‘True believers’

Of course true believers (in evolution), such as the antitheist
Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, argue that natural selection
acted like a filter to find and preserve rare information-adding mutations, thus
creating all the hundreds of thousands of genes with all their control systems that
are represented in plants, including the
amazing photosynthetic system.

Natural selection does operate in today’s world, but it merely gets rid of
the unfit, rather than creating the fit. See
‘Variation and natural selection versus evolution’. And
there are heaps of the unfit to get rid of because of the destructive effects of
mutations, which scramble the genetic information—they are known by the havoc
they cause. There is a web site devoted to human diseases caused by mutations
called ‘The Human Gene Mutation Database’. At
the date of writing, over 60,000 disease-causing mutations had been identified in
humans.

The informed evolutionist would admit that just selecting plants for disease resistance
won’t generate it if the genetic information was not already in the
seeds of the plants under investigation. They would insist that all this information
arose by natural processes over eons of time, but ‘explain’ that there
is not enough time in breeding experiments to see such new information arise.
However, there is not enough time, even given evolutionary notions of deep time,
for natural selection to get rid of all the information-destroying mutations or
just to spread some supposed new mutation in a population—Haldane’s
dilemma is a huge, unresolved problem for evolution, making it unworkable,
even given eons of time. It is like a supermarket making a small
loss on every item except an occasional product that makes a small profit: the supermarket
will never make an overall profit. And the longer it goes on the worse the
problem gets—time is not the hero of the plot that many evolutionists think
it is. See also, ‘Weasel,
a flexible program for investigating deterministic computer “demonstrations”
of evolution’ for a refutation of Dawkins’ fallacious ‘simulation’.

In spite of all the intelligence of scientists, they cannot invent / create the
biological information needed for disease resistance or drought tolerance in plants,
for example, but the evolutionists among them expect us to believe that the same
information that they cannot create came into existence by blind natural
processes without any intelligence whatsoever.

The science of genetics would benefit from an injection of logical thinking: complex
coded information speaks of creative intelligence, not dumb natural processes.
Such logical thinking would surely help advance the science of genetics and the
breeding of plants to efficiently feed and clothe the world’s population.
Biblical thinking makes for good science.

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